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3. Getting Out of Trouble

By now, I’m guessing you might have noticed that each folder that gets
added to the repository has a new read-only hidden folder. This is illustrated
in Listing 9, in which I display the contents of the container folder and I then
display the hidden files.

Listing 9 The hidden files

In the lower half of Listing 9, the listing command (dir) includes
the flag /AH. This has the effect of displaying hidden files and
folders, and in this case we see the hidden folder named .svn.
You’ll see one of these in each folder of your working copy.

It is this file that helps to provide much of the Subversion magic. For
99.999 percent of the time, you won’t care about the contents of the
.svn folder. However, let’s have a little poke around, as
illustrated in Listing 10.

Looking at Listing 11, the entries file keeps a record of all the
Subversion activities that relate to the folder in question, namely
C:\repworkarea. Details maintained in this file include revision
levels, file names, timestamps, checksums, author, type, and so on.

Clearly, modifying this file is a perilous pastime, so I won’t go into
any more details about it! It is interesting just to look.